Like how fabric or a boy's messy hair sways in the breeze? How city bricks get layers of dust and schmutz? How, when sunlight streams through smog and enters a corporate boardroom, it reflects off a brown shiny table and tinges, ever-so-slightly, the white walls with a hazy, brownish hue?

Care to speculate, by the way, what part of those walls would get that tinge? If so, you may be fit to be an animator.

Animators are obsessed with detail, Mike Belzer told a KAFI audience at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum on Saturday afternoon. And in 3-D, computer-generated animated films like Disney's "Meet the Robinsons," the look, lighting and motion of every detail need to be controlled.

Courtesy of Mike BelzerThis character from "Meet the Robinsons" was created by Mike Belzer of Disney Studios.

Belzer, who worked as animation supervisor on "Meet the Robinsons," gave the animation hopefuls in the Stryker Theater at the museum one bit of advice. The one thing they'll need in his field is "passion. You do it because you love it."
Otherwise, "it's too hard a process."

Belzer started his career in claymation, where he moved models bit by bit in Pillsbury Doughboy commercials and "The Nightmare Before Christmas."

Now he helps create the models inside computers, using the complicated 3-D rendering software Maya, plus Disney-designed software. If it weren't for the technology, films like "Robinsons" or DreamWork's "Shrek the Third" would look as stiff and lifeless as many video games.

It is possible to put computer programs in charge of animating individual little fire ants' legs as they crawl over a school coach's head, as in one "Robinsons" scene.

But software by itself isn't going to generate the right look of surprise and horror on the coach's face. In the many such instances, the animators' artistry still has the main role, Belzer showed, as he took the audience through each step in creating "Robinsons."

It starts with old-fashioned sketches to capture the look and feel the director wants -- the artist doing this has to have "elephant skin," Belzer said, since his work likely will be rejected many times. Then basic computer models are formed, virtual bones and muscles placed inside the characters, and colors and textures are added over all elements.

Every facial point can be tweaked -- Belzer compared that to being a cook adding "a dash of happy, a bit of sad."

Then they literally roll virtual cameras, shooting the 3-D virtual actors. Belzer demonstrated a virtual camera "rig," following a floating hat through a school gym's rafters. It worked in the same manner a real-life camera on a boom and crane would, except in its virtual world it is invisible and can pass through scenery.

But wait.

Belzer warned the young animators about a test of patience that had nothing to do with getting the nap of a sweater just right. In January 2006, when the animation on "Robinsons" was 80 percent complete, Disney bought Pixar, the company that started the computer-generated animation boom with "Toy Story."

A Pixar team went to work putting its creative spin on "Robinsons," and took the animation back to where it was about 30 percent complete.

An audience member asked Belzer, what did he do when that happened?

"(I) went in a corner and wept," he joked.

What would've taken three years to complete took more than four, Belzer said. But "Meet the Robinsons" was eventually released, late last March.